Harvard Stadium Football History

Welcome to Historic Harvard Stadium

When it was built, there were doubters who thought it would
never withstand the weight of a large crowd, let alone the brutal
cold of a New England winter.

But more than a century later it still stands proud, the
“aristocrat of American sports amphitheaters” as one
writer put it, and is celebrated for saving football as well as for
its timeless charm and fabulous sightlines for fans.

Harvard Stadium turns 107 years old this fall, and the
nation’s oldest permanent concrete structure for
intercollegiate athletics has never looked better. First opened
Nov. 14, 1903, for a game against Dartmouth, the Stadium has since
hosted over 660 Harvard football contests as well as hundreds of
other athletic and non-athletic events, including Olympic and
professional soccer, lacrosse, rock concerts, benefits and
political rallies.

In March of 1903, it was announced that the Class of 1879, in
honor of its 25th anniversary, would present the university with a
stadium seating 40,000 spectators. The plans provided for a
horseshoe-shaped structure of steel, similar to the stadium at
Athens, with seats of stone and concrete for 27,000 persons. An
additional 15,000 temporary seats were to be added whenever the
demand made it necessary. Its total cost was $310,000.

It would be a much-needed addition to the Harvard athletics
landscape. The football and baseball teams had played for several
years at Soldiers Field, where fans jammed into decaying, unsafe
wooden bleachers to cheer on the Crimson. Work on the Stadium began
shortly after the completion of the 1903 baseball season, and the
foundations were dug in early July. Even when the Stadium opened
some four-and-a-half months later, it was far from a finished
product. Much of the seating on its eastern side was of a temporary
wood nature and capacity stood at just 20,000.

The Stadium marked the first use of reinforced concrete on a
large scale, and skeptics abounded who were certain the building
would not be safe. To allay those fears, the construction
superintendent walked beneath the stands while spectators took
their seats on opening day.

In those days, football was a running and kicking game. But as
the sport became increasingly violent, some colleges were dropping
it in favor of rugby, so in 1906 U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt
1880 stepped in to save the game. He organized the Intercollegiate
Football Conference — a collection of 28 colleges and
universities and the forerunner of the NCAA — and demanded it
adopt rules changes to make the sport safer. Some suggested
widening the field, but the permanent nature of the stands at
Harvard Stadium made it impractical for the school to endorse this
plan.

Concerned that eliminating football at Harvard might mean the
end of the sport on a national level, the committee instead
approved the forward pass, though it did its best to minimize its
effect on the sport. In 1906, the penalty for an incomplete was for
the offensive team to lose possession (the rule was
“softened” in 1907 to a loss of 15 yards). Other rules
changes were also implemented, including giving the offense just
three downs instead of five to gain a first down and shortening
games from 70 to 60 minutes with a mandatory 10-minute rest between
halves. In hindsight, however, it was the adoption of the forward
pass that curtailed the sport’s violence and led to the surge
in popularity that remains to this day.

The Stadium colonnade was added in 1910, and the press box was
also built to accommodate growing media interest. When the press
box burned down in 1981, it was rebuilt at a cost of $375,000, more
than the price tag for the entire Stadium some 80 years earlier.
The Stadium’s seating area was refurbished two years
later.

Today, Harvard Stadium remains one of the great venues in all of
organized football. Sports fans from across the nation visit the
Stadium to experience the rich tradition, and Harvard’s
student-athletes are quick to talk about the unique experience of
playing in one of the sport’s true treasures.